News on October 1, this year On the evening of September 19, five days after Apple’s iPhone 13 conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook sent an email to employees with the subject only “anti-leakage.” Cook directly pointed out the company’s leak in the email. He pointed out that Apple’s new generation of iPhone 13 series mobile phones were almost exposed before the press conference .
Apple’s secret culture from the inside Disintegration
In addition, Apple held a staff meeting on September 17 to require frequent testing of unvaccinated employees, but there is no mandatory requirement for vaccinations. Unexpectedly, the content of this conference was also leaked to the media.
He vowed to find the “inner ghost”, “the person who leaked confidential information does not belong here.” Ironically, this email from Cook also leaked.
Cook is looking for the ghost
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Apple employees’ dissatisfaction with remote office arrangements, gender discrimination, and pay gaps made it difficult for them to remain silent. They began to speak out, exposing Apple’s internal issues on social media . The secrecy culture that Apple was once proud of is collapsing from within.
Remote office disputes become the fuse
On June 14 this year, Apple’s telecommuting advocacy organization sent an anonymous email to Cook. “We all agree that we work here at Apple to develop unparalleled great products that enrich people’s lives and enrich the world,” they wrote. “We are also convinced that increasing the flexibility of the resumption policy will allow us to create the same. Even better products.”
Just two weeks ago, Cook announced Apple’s policy to resume work. Starting in September, Apple employees need to work three days a week in the office, and they can choose to work from home on Wednesdays and Fridays.
This policy is not surprising. Apple management has never pretended that they want to fully adopt the online office model. However, this arrangement did not satisfy Apple employees. During the epidemic, Apple employees were used to working from home and did not want to return to the office.
The tension between the two parties may not have erupted so quickly, but a Slack channel called “support telecommuting” started To the role of fueling the flames . “Support Telecommuting” was established in September 2020 to promote a more flexible office environment. As of the summer of 2021, the number of members of the channel has reached approximately 2,800, and the conversations inside have become more and more active. After Cook announced the resumption of work policy, Apple employees knew they had to speak up. It is this small boycott that laid the foundation for Apple employees to organize protests in the next few months, and may also change the Apple workplace culture forever.
The secrecy culture is eroded
The remote office dispute is a symbol of deeper changes within Apple. Since 1976, Apple’s operations have been basically the same: management makes decisions about the company’s operations, and employees either agree or leave. Do they have a choice? Apple’s current market value is as high as 2 trillion US dollars, and it is already the most valuable company in the world and one of the most powerful companies.
However, in the past few months, this culture has begun to erode. As employees in the technology industry fight for more power, Apple’s top-down management model seems to be outdated more than ever. Now, more and more employees build organizations internally to seek change, and speak out their working environment on Twitter.
“The balance of power is changing here,” said former Macworld magazine editor Jason Snell (Jason Snell), who has been reporting on Apple since the 1990s News, “Not everyone is afraid that the boss will fire them. In their opinion,’I will tell some bad things about Apple. If you target me, then it will make you look bad’.”
This change stems to a certain extent from Apple’s two years of radical new experiment: the use of Slack. Apple employees had previously worked in a very isolated team and had no chance to meet colleagues outside the current project or department. Now they can use Slack to communicate with anyone in the company. Employees have discovered that their personal complaints about work are shared among different departments within Apple.
The complaints of employees vary from person to person. Some employees want Apple to invest in internal tools to protect their personal privacy. Other employees want Apple to be more transparent in terms of compensation. Many people feel that Apple’s employee relations team is seriously inadequate in addressing their workplace concerns. From senior software engineers in Cupertino to retail employees in New Jersey, the strongest desire of Apple employees is that their voices can be heard.
The first public challenge to the management decision-making
On May 11, 2021, a group of female Apple employees discovered that Apple had hired former Facebook product manager Antonio Garcia Martinez (Antonio Garcia Martinez). Martinez once published a book called “Chaos Monkey” in which he described women in the Bay Area as “weak, pampered, and naive”. In the eyes of female Apple employees, Martinez hates women and is a racist.
The female Apple employees started discussing this issue on the Slack channel and finally decided to write an internal letter to Eddy Cue, the senior vice president of Apple’s services business. They do not necessarily ask the company to fire Martinez, but they just want to know how he was recruited by Apple in the first place.
The next day, when they were finishing up the internal letter, one of the versions was leaked to the media. A few hours later, Martinez was fired.
For many female employees in the Slack channel, the leak of the letter made them feel offended. Their original intention was to keep the letter inside the company, but they just wanted to get in touch with Apple’s management and listen to them.
However, from the perspective of Apple’s employee organization, this also represents a turning point. After this letter was exposed, another employee organization sent a letter to Cook asking Apple to publicly support Palestine, which was fatally injured by an Israeli bomb attack. Then, the Slack channel, which supports “remote office,” released an internal letter to resist the resumption of work policy. They also circulated a survey within the company asking their colleagues what they thought of returning to work in the office. The results of this survey were quickly released to the public. Nearly 90% of respondents said that flexible office options are important to them.
These advocacy actions have allowed Apple employees to participate in the broader movement for change in the technology industry. Since at least 2018, these movements are shaking up the technology industry. For example, Google employees went on strike to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment, Amazon warehouse workers tried to form a union, and Facebook employees leaked their grievances to the media.
It is worth noting that this is the first time that Apple employees have joined the protest team and publicly boycotted the decision or inaction of the company’s management.
Apple takes action against
On August 20 this year, Apple announced that due to the rebound of new coronary pneumonia cases, the company will postpone the resumption of work until at least January 2022. Apple employees’ support for telecommuting quickly disappeared because they knew they would not be forced to return to work anytime soon.
Apple began to rectify non-work Slack channels. After the female Apple employee submitted an internal letter regarding the hiring of Martinez, the Apple employee relations team announced a series of regulations prohibiting the opening of channels unrelated to Apple’s business unless they are part of an employee club or diversity group. These regulations do not apply to existing Slack channels, which leads to a strange phenomenon: Apple prohibits the establishment of company-wide pay equality channels, but allows channels to discuss cats and dogs.
Then on September 9th, Apple took the first major public action in response to employee objections : Dismissed Ashley Gjøvik, Apple’s senior engineering project manager who complained about gender discrimination, on the grounds Geovik leaked confidential Apple information and violated the confidentiality agreement.
The dismissal of Geovic may really mean that Apple executives are starting to pay attention to employee protests. However, Apple may not be able to prevent employees from communicating with each other. Many people are already in contact and start organizing operations. Some employees have joined Discord channels for non-work purposes to discuss pay equity and other issues that exist in multiple teams at Apple.
For some employees, the condition of working at Apple is to endure the company’s hierarchical system and confidentiality culture. But for those employees who rebelled, the question they want to ask is: Does it really have to be this way?
Apple has not yet commented.
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